#58 in Classics
The Farthest Shore
- 223
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- National Book Award
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Our view
“The Farthest Shore” is Earthsea at its most reflective, a sea voyage that keeps turning into a meditation. Le Guin’s prose is the draw: spare and exact across just over two hundred pages. Some readers find the closing chapters, with their unexplained logic of life and death, hard to follow at first. It rewards those willing to come back to it.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Farthest Shore is a fantasy novel by the American author Ursula K. Le Guin, first published by Atheneum in 1972. It is the third novel in the series commonly called the Earthsea Cycle. Since the next Earthsea novel, Tehanu, would not be released until 1990, The Farthest Shore is sometimes called the final book in the "Earthsea trilogy", beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. The Farthest Shore follows the wizard Ged in an adventure.
Reading order · Earthsea series
Full order & progress →- A Wizard of EarthseaStart here
7.87.8 / 10 - The Tombs of Atuan
8.18.1 / 10 - The Farthest ShoreThis book
8.18.1 / 10 - Tehanu
8.08.0 / 10 - Tales from Earthsea
8.08.0 / 10 - The Other Wind
8.18.1 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 589 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 80% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Classics average of 7.7 barely moves it. A further +0.10 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.8 | 48 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 541 | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Farthest Shore?
It has 223 pages — shorter than 98% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 7.9 and 8.1, closest to this book.
